THE GUARDIAN: The final stretch of the JP Morgan Chase chief’s career is a bumpy one, as Trump himself demands prosecutors investigate Epstein’s ties to Dimon’s bank
Jamie Dimon, the longtime chief of JP Morgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, was under oath. The occasion was a May 2023 deposition related to several lawsuits filed against his bank over its history of involvement with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The question put to Dimon was straightforward: “When did you first learn that Jeffrey Epstein was a customer of JPMorgan?”
His answer seemed clear: “I don’t recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein until the stories broke sometime in 2019” – meaning the stories about Epstein’s arrest by federal authorities in the summer of 2019 and his death a month later in a Manhattan jail cell.
Clear, but believable? This exchange can be found in the US justice department’s Epstein files, with the digital “Epstein library”, as it’s called, tabulating 204 “results” (separate documents, though some duplicative) for Dimon, at current count, and 9,404 for his bank.
Epstein was a client of JP Morgan Chase for 15 years, from 1998 to 2013, for the last eight of which Dimon was the bank’s CEO, the position he still holds. And Epstein was not just any client, but a prized one of JPMorgan’s private bank for ultra-wealthy customers. A JP Morgan report, belatedly filed with the treasury department, flagged about 4,700 Epstein-related “suspicious activity” transactions totaling $1.1bn, including payments to women from post-Soviet countries. Through Dimon’s bank, Epstein wired hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian banks.
Not only that, a top former JP Morgan executive, Jes Staley, undermined Dimon’s sworn testimony – claiming to have communicated with Dimon on Epstein years before the 2019 arrest. And a current senior bank executive, Mary Erdoes, often said to be on Dimon’s shortlist of candidates to succeed him as CEO, was also actively involved with the Epstein account and was aware, as documents show, of Epstein’s court-affirmed status as a high-risk sex offender. » | Paul Starobin | Friday, February 13, 2026